Robin Weeks 6/17/25

(This interview has been edited and condensed for length)

Zack: Thank you so much for being here with us, Robin. Tell us a little bit about your caregiver journey.

Robin: I started out not even realizing I was a caregiver. My father had become terminally ill and then died six months later. Five days before my dad died, my older brother, who lived there in town where my parents were, died. So, there were two deaths in the span of one week. We knew he was ill. But he was hiding the seriousness of that from us because he was trying to care for my parents….

So, I jumped into looking after my mother. I live in Virginia. She lived in Tennessee at the time, and I was going back and forth once or twice a month. I didn't realize I was caregiving. I didn't think of it that way. She was just in what I now know … what we call complicated grief…. I couldn't sustain the travel back and forth. I have a leadership coaching and training business, and I couldn't keep it up… And she needed family. She had friends in their retirement community. She needed family. With my older brother gone, there was no family there.

So, I convinced her to move to assisted living near me here, and she agreed. And that kicked everything into high gear. I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew I had to take care of her. She was fine physically... Cognitively, she was just in real deep grief and wouldn't talk about it, would not process it. This was in 02/2013. I moved her here. I just started looking after her. It wasn't caregiving in my world. It was just looking after my mom.

Selma: And were you working at the time?

Robin: Oh, yeah. I'm running my business. Running it quite well for a while, thinking I could manage all of this. It was no problem. I just dropped by there… every now and then… At that point, she had quit driving. So, I was doing all the driving. That meant taking her to doctor's appointments… I brought her out to my house on weekends for several years while she was still physically able to come out here. Which meant when she was here on the weekends, which is usually three or four days, that was a lot of care because she was ambulatory. She would use the cane. She was 90 years old too. 89, somewhere in there. I was always one ear listening for a fall if she got up at night and things like that. She started becoming more frail.

Eventually, she couldn't come out here anymore. There were all these trips to the ER. There were hospital visits. You know, things just start mounting up. And then I had to move her to a higher level of assisted living where she had more care available to her on a daily basis. And that's when things kicked into real gear. Then I realized I was a caregiver.  Somebody said to me, “You are probably one of the best caregivers I've seen around here because you're such a big advocate for your mom.”  I said, “What do you mean caregiving?” This was the administrator, and he said, “You're a caregiver, Robin. You're taking care of your mom. You're advocating for her.” It just sort of stunned me that he was using that word. So that's how the journey started, and it was over six years. She died at 94, and it was six really good years. Three of them were great years. The last three were the hardest because of her health, and that was the more intense caregiving that I had for her. I ran the gamut… from my mom's doing okay to my mom's declining, to her passing away, and then that year after of transitioning out of caregiving… It was hard.

Zack: Did anything change when this administrator said to you, “You're a caregiver?” And then, can you maybe just share a couple of things about trying to run a business and being a caregiver at the same time?

Robin: When he said to me, “You're a caregiver,” I asked him what he meant. He started saying, “You do this, you do that… That means you're caring for your mother.” I said, “But she's so capable of doing so many things.” He said, “Yes. However, you're doing a lot of other things for her, and you're her advocate. And that was an important distinction that he made, that I was always advocating for her well-being. So that changed my mental state as to how I was doing things. I will say this, it didn't necessarily change it in a positive way because it made me more protective. It made me more determined to make decisions for her, which she really didn't need me to make. That started a lot of battles between the two of us. Because then I felt like, oh, gosh, now I have this role. I have to fulfill it.

So that's how things sort of changed. And to your other question about how it affected my business, I felt like I could do it all. I just thought I could manage everything.  Self-employed. If I need to run by there at lunch, I'll put it in my calendar, and I'll run by there at lunch. If I need to take her to the doctor, I'll put it in my calendar and take her to the doctor. However, what started to happen as her needs increased, she became more frail and there were more hospital visits and more ER visits and that sort of thing, and then rehab. I had to start cutting back on my client load. I couldn't carry the number of clients that I was carrying initially. I had to cut back, which meant my income got reduced. The impact on me to that, well, I didn't have an employer I could go to. I had to still work because I'm self-employed. I couldn't quit. But I reduced my income by about 30% overall those last three years where I had cut back my client load.  It was a significant reduction in income for me. It was hard to come back after that the year afterwards.

Selma: Your consulting company, My Pivotal Point, how did you come to develop this? And what was your pivotal point?

Robin: Well, the company name came from my leadership training coaching business. I coach a lot of managers and leaders in companies. They would have these pivotal shifts through our coaching process. And when I first started the company in 2010, someone just said to me, “Why don't you call it Pivotal Point?” Then it became My Pivotal Point…. When you ask what my pivotal point was, it was really when my dad and my brother died. I didn't know that was the point, but that was the point at which my life pivoted and changed for a very long time. Changed me as well.

Selma: Did you recognize at the time that your dad and your brother died that it was your pivotal point?

Robin: It was truly, Selma, after my mother died. Caregiving is a role. It's a job. We know it's an unpaid job, but it's also a role…. Caring for your parent as they are aging and coming towards the end of their life has a whole different set of dynamics to it. I didn't realize how much doing that with and for my mother had changed me as a person until after she died.  And I was not only grieving her death, but I was grieving the loss of my role, which had a lot of meaning for me. It was a very purposeful thing to be doing. I never felt the depth of compassion for another person as I did while I was caring for my mother.

Selma: You said you had to reduce your income by about 30 percent. What do you think would have helped you the most at that time in caring for your parents?

Robin: Having support. I sought out support. I attended a support group. I didn't feel it was that helpful. I sought out online chat forums, but didn't find them that helpful; I didn't have the support that I needed. I needed someone who could tell me what this was like…. the whole thing was nothing but a learning experience for me. And I needed someone to say, what you're experiencing right now or feeling right now is normal. Accept it.

Zack: What do you think employers need to do more so that they are supportive of their working caregivers?

Robin: I approached a lot of the companies with whom I worked in the leadership training capacity… I started approaching them when I started the business about my services, because this is really part of what spurred me to start this caregiving side of my business. I was training managers, and during the years I was caregiving for my mother, I would walk into my leadership training classes, and I'd hold my phone up, and I'd say: “Okay, you guys know what to do with these, but I get excused from that because I'm taking care of my mother, and I'm pretty much on call twenty-four seven.” And they started coming up to me and asking me questions and telling me they were starting to care for their parents, and they didn't know what to do about this, and they were worried about that. And their parents were two or three states away. I realized, wow, there's this whole population out there, people just like me. And at the time, I was in deep caregiving.

… I have found in talking with employers of the size that I have worked with, that it's not on their radar screen right now… And when I've approached the employers, it's been sort of, yeah, okay. Just send us some information. And we know that a lot of caregiving employees don't talk about it… And employers don't open up that conversation, and I'm not sure they even understand how to create those avenues for those conversations to happen.

Zack:  What's something that you do to help them do that?

Robin: I have a series of courses all online. And I think one of the things employers look for… what's affordable and what's easy… I think an online solution to offering education to and support for the caregiving of the employee that sort of takes it off their plate, doesn't eliminate the problem… but it's an… easy solution for an employer to take to offer. I do know employee resource groups, ERGs, are another good way when companies do those.

Selma: What can caregiving employees do to get on their employer's radar so that they do get the support and the help they need?

Robin: One of the things that I encourage the caregivers with whom I work to do is to talk with their manager when they see it coming and because my whole approach is proactive. I was not ready for this. I learned about halfway in to be getting ready for stuff because I'd already had it coming. When you see it coming or you know it's coming down the road, that's the time to go talk with your manager and say, I'm going to be moving my father here to assisted living…. I might need a little time off here and there and get him settled in. And now what you're doing is basically creating awareness around the fact that you have this other responsibility... It does behoove an employee to bring it up and not sit silently with it.

Zack:  I love that you got in front of a group and you said, Hey, phone's down, but I get to have mine because of this. And then the conversations that resulted in that, I think that's awesome.

Robin:  Companies I work with when I did my leadership training courses, I generally engaged with the company for about three years. And during one of those sessions, I was talking with one of the CEOs or CFOs of the company, and he was standing there in the back of the room… I just casually off handedly said to him, “Hey, I understand you're caring for your mother. So am I.” And we got into a conversation. Then I mentioned, “Do you know you have a lot of employees here that are doing that?”  Sometimes I think that's all it takes is that sharing and to get the executives to share their stories. There are plenty of them doing this.

Selma: In the work that you do from the first day you start with the company, working with them in terms of the caregiver exposure and raising their awareness, can you see a shift in their culture by the end of that third year?

Robin: In the leadership work, yes.  Because I'm working at the manager level, and what happens is they put through one class of managers, and they put through a second one and then they put through a third one. And when I get into year two, there's stuff changing going upwards because now we've got two groups of managers that have been through these trainings and they're, drinking the Kool Aid, so to speak.

Zack:  A question we love to ask is if you were to go back to 2013, mom moved close to you, and you said you just weren't prepared. What would you tell the younger Robin right before you got started at that point?

Robin: I would have told myself to sit down with my two younger brothers and have a very hard conversation about what this was going to look like and how we were all going to play a role in it because that conversation never happened. They did not help very much. So that would be one piece of advice I would give to myself is have that conversation with your siblings now before it gets hard. And secondly, I would have told myself to figure out how to manage my workload. I don't know that I could have found a way around reducing my client load other than having more help. Had I had those conversations with my siblings, would they have flown all the way here from four or five states away for a week at a time? Probably not. But maybe I could have found an alternative way that I could have not had to cut back as much as I did.

Zack: Robin, please tell our readers how they can find you and why would they want to contact you.

Robin: Thanks, Zack. I am online. My website is mypivotalpoint.com. I'm on Facebook. I'm on LinkedIn. Every month, I do two free calls for caregivers, and I post those on LinkedIn and Facebook as well. My membership is open, and I've just restructured the whole thing. It's full of benefits at a very affordable, low price.

Zack and Selma:  Thank you, Robin, so much. We appreciate your time.